The common channels used for advertising are television, internet, and mobile among others. Various advertising methods are being used to make it more efficient.
With the rapid growth of telecommunications worldwide, mobile commerce has become a reality. Mobile communication has also become an important channel for marketing various services. Over past few years, email messages have been used to market services. Service providers obtain the email ids from various sources including other service providers in various domains who have access to information of their customers. Similarly, mobile devices being common today, various service providers having access to mobile contact information of their customers can potentially share such information with other marketing agencies or service providers who would want to market their services. However, privacy concerns attached to such sharing of mobile contact information is much more than it is to email id. At the same time, in order to market services, subscribers to such mobile contact information are also not guaranteed of their success through such sending campaigns to any available mobile contact information and they need to make sure that their advertisements are reaching the right audience by ensuring that the audience to which they are sending messages belong to a context related to the marketing effort.
Therefore, it is important to determine the advertisements that the user would be most receptive to ensuring that advertisements are not treated as spam and intruding in to users privacy. This requires determination of context. Determining the exact context is complex as there are multiple dimensions to it. Context is a dynamically changing phenomena and normally is quite ambiguous and subjective.
Attempts have been made to create a framework for delivering context sensitive advertisements. US patent application 20050080665A1 describes a context sensitive advertisement delivery framework where the specific advertisements are transmitted to the mobile wireless device. In this patent application an identifier associated with the mobile device and the state and location of the mobile device is ascertained after receiving a signal from the device. A context engine is used to update the profile database by using the gathered information. The location of the mobile is associated with a landmark in the profile database; the advertisements are then transmitted to the mobile device by selecting the advertisements from the advertisement database by utilizing the context engine based on identifier, state, location, and landmark of the mobile wireless. The patent application does not facilitate the user to choose the advertisement according to personal preferences.
However, contexts being dynamic, tracing an a wireless mobile device using a identifier and the location of the device is not sufficient. Current system provides a new model for determining such contexts. System proposes having mechanisms to allow user to interact with the system at multiple network end points. These interactions along with location of the mobile phone, user profile and statistical modelling (based on the interaction patterns of other users) it would be possible to create set of contexts with detailed parameters. Based on the determined context a targeted communication can be determined that will be effective.